A Seed and a Century, Part I: From a Chaoshan Seed Stall to Asia's Agribusiness Empire

Grand narratives tend to begin as footnotes. This one begins with a vegetable seed from the Chaoshan coast of southern China, carried in a young man’s luggage across the South China Sea to take root in the warm soil of Siam. No one foresaw that the seed — freighted with a family’s livelihood and its homesickness — would grow into the Charoen Pokphand Group: CP to the world, Chia Tai in China, a four-generation epic running from a tiny shop in Bangkok’s Chinatown to a conglomerate that spans feed and food, retail, telecommunications, and finance.

The Mushroom Boy of Chaozhou

Chia Ek Chor was born in 1896 into a comfortable landowning family in Chaozhou, Guangdong. Comfort undid it: his father, living idly on rents, sank into opium and died in his early thirties, when the boy was fifteen or sixteen, leaving five children to fend for themselves. As eldest son, Ek Chor became provider overnight. His one conspicuous gift was agricultural — neighbors nicknamed the boy who could coax straw mushrooms from any pile “the mushroom fellow.”

The Chaoshan coast bred traders: hemmed in by land, open to the sea, trading abroad since the Song dynasty, emigrating in waves after the port of Shantou opened in 1860. King Rama VI of Siam, struck by how rich its migrants grew and how faithfully they remitted earnings home, called them the “Jews of the East” — admiration laced with suspicion, fuel for a first anti-Chinese backlash that faded with the king’s death in 1925. Around 1919, in his early twenties, Ek Chor sailed for Siam — the one Southeast Asian country never colonized, with no overlord and no Western monopolies to smother a small man’s start — and landed in Bangkok’s Chinatown with nothing.

Seeds in Painted Paper

The business he chose was seeds, and the logic was airtight. Chaoshan vegetable seed was superb; the Chinese migrants of Siam, mostly fellow Teochew, still farmed and missed the crops of home; and seed saved abroad degenerated within a season, so every planting needed fresh stock from China. In 1921 he opened a storefront under the sign Chia Tai — in Mandarin, Zheng Da, “upright and great,” half of a four-character ideal meaning open, honest, and aboveboard. In Shantou he had earlier run a shop whose name meant “radiant and great”; the two names bookended one aspiration.

Then he did what the trade found ridiculous. Where vendors rolled seed in scrap paper, Chia Tai sold it in small color-printed packets — color printing was then rare anywhere, let alone on a farm product — stamped with an expiry date and a promise of free replacement if the seed failed to sprout: a warranty nearly unheard of. His reasoning was moral before it was commercial. Farming is bitter work; a farmer’s seed money is blood money; no coin should be earned against conscience. The way to win farmers was seed that germinated better and yielded more at the same price — which meant breeding it himself. He had no formal agronomy (the family’s last savings had schooled his second brother), but through a trial farm in Chaozhou and breeding plots in Siam he worked out his own methods, then ranged across China and abroad for varieties. Within a few years the little shop was known across Southeast Asia.

One story became family scripture. In Malaysia he bought a superb papaya — thick, sweet, eighteen plump seeds — from a stall nobody visited: the vendor dumped rinds at his feet, and the stench and flies drove buyers off. Ek Chor sent over two big buckets, free, via a hotel bellboy — collect the waste, keep the ground clean, the customers will return; and dry the seeds, because on my next trip I will buy them. Months later he paid the young man well and sold the stock as Chia Tai papaya seed, to instant success. Vendor, bellboy, seedsman — three winners, and his method in miniature: spot what others overlook, and enlist help by sharing the gain.

As the shop grew he called his third brother, Chia Seow Whooy, from China — steady, capable, remembered as co-founder — and hired an Englishman for foreign business, a startling move then; the man stayed until past eighty.

The Egg Chief’s Apprenticeship

Ek Chor married Chen Jinzhi, a Chaozhou merchant’s daughter orphaned by a tidal wave. Their four sons — Jaran, Montri, Sumet, Dhanin — bore Chinese given names, Zhengmin, Damin, Zhongmin, Guomin, that read in sequence as “Zheng Da Zhong Guo”: Chia Tai, China. The children were schooled in China, and though the family later took Thai nationality, all of that generation spoke fluent Chinese.

History kept intervening. The Pacific war of 1941 cut the seed routes, stranded Ek Chor in Malaya, and marooned his two eldest sons, then students, in Chengdu; Seow Whooy alone held Bangkok through the war. The family regrouped after 1945 — by one account restarting on duck-feather exports — and in 1953 the eldest son, Jaran, pushed beyond seeds into animal feed, reorganizing the shop as a limited company under a Thai name: Charoen Pokphand, roughly “prosperity through goods for the people.” CP was born.

The founder, meanwhile, answered New China’s call to overseas Chinese. In the early 1950s he returned to Chaoshan with his youngest son, eleven-year-old Dhanin, to breed seed and chair the county overseas-Chinese federation. Dhanin — a Chinatown boy speaking Teochew and Thai, little Mandarin — floundered in a Shantou fourth grade until a teacher named Chen tutored him on rest days. What emerged was a natural captain: his study groups lifted the class from the school’s bottom to first place within a year; he was elected monitor, won basketball and tug-of-war titles, befriended the worst troublemakers, raised pigeons and fighting cocks, and dreamed of directing films. The family had found its heir. Then the weather turned: by the late 1950s, land reform and nationalization had reclassified the returned patriot as a capitalist and landlord, his Shantou seed company and farm were confiscated, and he escaped the struggle sessions only because illness had already sent him to Hong Kong for surgery. Heartbroken, he went back to Thailand; Dhanin, seventeen, broke off school in Hong Kong and followed, around 1956.

The brothers made the youngest start at the bottom — wiping tables, running errands, minding the till. His first test came from Montri, who exported live hogs to Hong Kong: two or three thousand pigs to a ship, dozens or more than a hundred dead on every crossing. Montri posted a bounty — a hundred baht, then a small fortune, per pig saved. Dhanin went to the docks and watched: the deaths clustered at the pitching bow and in unsheltered weather. He had the stevedores load amidships and astern and rig tarpaulins — offering them fifty baht per pig saved. Mortality fell at a stroke; he split the winnings as promised. Two lessons, he said later: method and detail cut losses, and letting others profit wins their effort — his father’s dictum that only the ungrudging do big business. At barely twenty-something he was made manager of a government-CP cooperative monopolizing Bangkok’s egg exports — the city’s “egg chief” — until the early 1960s, when China, repaying Soviet debts, flooded Asia with cheap produce; prices collapsed, the cooperative dissolved, and he went back to the family firm.

Surgery on the Family Firm

By the mid-1960s CP was Thailand’s biggest feed producer, still run like a clan — relatives on every payroll, sisters-in-law keeping the books. Montri ceded the general manager’s post to his youngest brother, and Dhanin performed the operation that kills many Chinese family firms: separating ownership from management. Relatives left their posts but kept fair shares and dividends — paid comfortably to step aside, so no one lost — while professional managers and modern systems came in from outside. The family’s good faith held; there was no war. After five years of steep growth, Jaran did something rarer still: the founding eldest son handed the chairmanship to Dhanin, then pushed him abroad — CP already dealt with a big American feed company in the Rockefeller orbit — overriding his brother’s qualms about the cost: the money is well spent; go and see how world-class companies run.

The trip became the hinge of CP’s history. Dhanin toured America’s most advanced farms and mills, brought home superior broiler breeds and complete production technology, and concluded that selling feed was the small game. His instrument for moving downstream was contract farming — “company plus farmer”: CP arranged bank loans for chicken houses, supplied chicks, feed, and visiting veterinarians, and guaranteed to buy the grown birds back at a floor price. Villagers suspected a swindle until a few volunteers raised ten thousand thriving birds and sold them high; then the countryside converted en masse, families that had kept a few dozen chickens raised thousands, and Thai poultry leapt a generation. “Without that trip to America,” Dhanin said, “there would have been no CP as it became.” His father had joked when the succession was settled: you loved raising chickens and pigeons as a boy — the poultry business is yours.

The chicken pulled the whole chain behind it — seed, feed, breeding, slaughter, processing, branded food — and the model was stamped onto pigs, ducks, fish, and shrimp. In the 1970s CP carried it across Asia: Japan bought so much Thai chicken, pork, and seafood that wits called Thailand “Japan’s kitchen”; the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia followed. By the decade’s end CP was Asia’s largest modern agribusiness, with one blank on its map: China.

License 0001

Reform came in 1978, the joint-venture law in July 1979, and by that year’s end Dhanin was back among the very first overseas investors. His first errand was personal: he found teacher Chen living three to a room of six or seven square meters and offered a house with a courtyard; refused, he moved the family into the Chias’ old Shantou home and later bought them an apartment. Then business. In 1980, in the new Shenzhen special economic zone, CP and America’s Continental Grain built a feed mill named Chia Tai Conti — reviving the founder’s shop name — and received Shenzhen’s foreign-investment license number 0001: the first foreign-invested enterprise of reformed China, its 1981 certificate now in the Shenzhen Museum. The mill opened in 1982; farms followed; a carpet factory took Shantou’s first joint-venture license; mills rose in Shanghai, Chengdu, and Harbin. By the late 1980s CP led China’s feed industry, priced well above market and still selling out, because the bag came bundled with technology, credit, and guaranteed buyback. In 1987 a young Sichuanese named Liu Yonghao watched farmers queue for CP pig feed in Chengdu, moved his fledgling venture into feed, and built New Hope, today one of China’s largest feed companies.

Then, improbably, television. Dhanin — the boy who had wanted to direct films — found Chinese TV dull, teamed up in 1989 with the veteran Taiwanese producer Weng Bingrong, and in April 1990 their creation premiered in Sunday prime time on national television: the Chia Tai Variety Show, a tour of the world’s wonders spliced with quizzes — “You never know till you look: what a wonderful world.” Its hosts included the comedian Jiang Kun and a twenty-two-year-old discovery named Yang Lan, whose American tuition Dhanin later quietly paid in full. The show was a sensation, opened a window on the world for a generation, and made Chia Tai a household name — a halo over everything the group later launched in China, from malls to Gong Li-advertised motorcycles to Chia Tai Pharmaceutical.

In the spring of 1990, Deng Xiaoping received Dhanin alone at Zhongnanhai — no longer one face in a Thai delegation but CP’s chairman; the Malaysian magnate Robert Kuok followed within months. Beijing was honoring those who had committed while others hesitated, and after Deng’s southern tour, overseas Chinese money surged. That year Dhanin bet on Pudong while Hong Kong investors dismissed it as wasteland — roads first, then $450 million for the Super Brand Mall beside the Oriental Pearl Tower, opened in 2002 as the district’s landmark. In June 1997 CP opened mainland China’s first hypermarket in Pudong, Yichu Lianhua — “Ek Chor” for his father, “Lotus” for Thailand’s national flower; renamed CP Lotus from 2007, it stayed modest, a hundred-odd stores by 2022, but it marked the trail.

At home, the 7-Eleven franchise, secured in 1988, spread until Thais called the stores a second home — and Dhanin used their tills as a divining rod: whatever sold hot, CP bought the supplier or built its own brand. The refrigeration unit became Thailand’s largest retail-equipment company, the distribution centers one of its biggest logistics operators, a phone-bill desk the telecom carrier True. By the mid-1990s the group stood on three legs — agri-food, retail, telecom and media — in a Thailand growing near double digits, its 1996 income per head of $3,054 nearly four times mainland China’s. CP borrowed big and expanded everywhere. Booms end.

The Storm and the Homecoming

On July 2, 1997, Thailand abandoned the baht’s fixed exchange rate. The currency fell 17 percent that day and nearly half within months; Bangkok stocks lost seventy percent; more than half the country’s financial institutions failed. CP, Thailand’s largest private company, watched its dollar debts balloon while credit vanished and projects froze. Dhanin cut off limbs to save the body: he sold most of the flourishing Lotus superstore chain to Britain’s Tesco and let the Shanghai motorcycle venture and other non-core assets go. But he refused to retreat from China, borrowing wherever he could to finish the half-built Super Brand Mall and holding the mainland supermarkets and pharmaceutical interests. Food proved crisis-proof — staples rose while everything else fell — and agribusiness earnings funded the recovery.

Then he kept a vow: buy the children back. In 2013 CP paid about $6.6 billion for a 64.35 percent controlling stake in the Makro wholesale chain — sold under duress, returned after sixteen years — then bid for the rest. In 2020, with Thai partners, it paid Tesco more than ten billion dollars for the entire Lotus business in Thailand and Malaysia, the largest acquisition in Thai corporate history. “The price was never the issue,” Dhanin said. “They were our children, raised for a while by someone else. They turned out well — how could I not bring them home?” Fortune named him among the world’s fifty most influential business leaders in 2003; in 2008 he became founding president of China’s national federation of overseas-Chinese entrepreneurs.

The new century added scale upon scale. In 2000 his nephew Tse Ping founded Sino Biopharmaceutical, now among China’s ten largest drugmakers, while the group’s pharmaceutical arm took stakes in more than twenty Chinese firms. At the end of 2012, CP paid about HK$72.7 billion for HSBC’s 15.57 percent of Ping An Insurance, becoming its largest single shareholder; in 2015, with Japan’s Itochu, it put some HK$80.3 billion into CITIC Limited — roughly 20 percent on full conversion, the second-largest holding. It also knew when to step back: in October 2023, with hog prices in a trough and regulators tightening, CP withdrew its agribusiness unit’s Shanghai listing to wait out the cycle.

Today the group operates in more than a hundred countries with over 450,000 employees; sales in 2024 ran to about $102.2 billion — the output of a mid-sized nation — and the Chia family has sat atop Thailand’s rich list for years, a giant nearly invisible the way infrastructure is invisible. Succession has defied the proverb that wealth never survives three generations: Dhanin, born in 1939, stepped back in 2017 to the rare title of Senior Chairman; his eldest son, Soopakij, born 1964, chairs the group; his third son, Suphachai, born 1967, is chief executive; the second son, known by his Chinese names Xie Hanren and Xie Mingxing, long ran the China superstores to middling results and plays a lesser role. One daughter left investing to found international schools; the younger, Xie Chunmei, prospers in property and investment. The brothers agreed that top management should turn over every ten years; by 2027, Dhanin says, he will leave the board entirely, Soopakij will become senior chairman, Suphachai chairman, and the CEO’s chair will pass to a fourth-generation family member or a professional manager.

A hundred years after a boy from Chaozhou sailed south with a bag of seeds, the empire he planted helps feed a continent. But the building of it is only the story’s A-side. Harder than making a fortune is keeping one, and the finer craft lies in how a clan of hundreds, four generations deep, holds its compact — balancing family, managers, and public shareholders; keeping a ten-year succession clock in time with industrial cycles; teaching heirs both global vision and mud-on-the-boots execution; wiring in the fuses of equity, trusts, and charters that protect a house when platforms meet politics. Those are the questions of Part II. The tide that carried the seed south has not finished sounding.